Friday, August 21, 2009

Except when I'm being a total smart ass or self indulgent emo telling the Ruby community to f' off, most of what I write talks about practical stuff, often with a small dose of theory. But this time it's about theory with a small dose of practice.

Last time I talked about the way programmers in popular C derived languages C++, Java, and C# think of a void function as being one that returns nothing. I contrasted this with the functional view that such functions return something, they just return the unit value (), something that doesn't carry any information. To expand on this I want to talk about actually returning nothing.

In any Turing complete language it is possible to write a function that really truly never returns anything, not even a made-up singleton value like (). In C style languages the simplest such function might contain an infinite loop like

while(true);

For my purposes a better way to explore the idea is with infinite recursion. Pretend your favorite C style language does tail call optimization[1] so we can ignore stack overflow issues and examine the following

X foo(){ return foo(); }

The question is what should the X be? And the answer is that if you plug that line of code into C, C++, C#, or Java then X can be just about any type you want[2].

If that doesn't give you pause then consider this: your type system appears to be lying to you. The function is promising an X but has no hope of delivering. And its quite happy to promise you any X. If you write "String foo(){ return foo(); }" then your type system considers the expression "foo();" to have type String so that you can write "String myFoo = foo();". But guess what, foo doesn't return a String and myFoo will never get a String. Is the type system lying?

The answer is no, of course not. It's just proving something a bit weaker than you might think at first. Instead of proving that "foo() will compute something that is a String" it's proving that "foo() won't compute something that isn't a String." If your "Law of the Excluded Middle" sense just tweaked, then you're on the right page. You'd think there are only two cases to consider: either the function definitely computes a String or it definitely doesn't. But there's this third case where it doesn't compute anything, and since the type checker can't reliably detect non-termination (c.f. Turing Halting Problem) it has to do something a bit odd. First, it assumes that the foo() declaration is correct and does return a String. Then it goes looking for a contradiction such as returning an int. Inside the function the compiler sees that the return is the result of the expression foo(). But the compiler has already assumed that foo() returns a String. There's no contradiction between declared and result so all is happy. The word "tautology" should come to mind right about now. By assuming X is true the type checker has proved that X is true. This weakening is a practical consequence of the Turing Halting Problem and there are at least two good ways to think about it. But first some more examples of the phenomenon.

Exceptions and Exits and ...

I very casually suggested that we ignore stack overflow issues in the infinite recursion above. But exceptions are an important part of this story because they are, in some interesting way, related to non-termination. Consider this function (or its equivalent in your favorite language)

X foo(){ throw new RuntimeException(); }

Once again, X can be any type. And once again foo() does not in fact compute an X.

Clearly these two definitions of foo are different things. Non-termination means we're stuck whereas an exception means we might be able to recover and try something else, or at least notify that there's a problem and shutdown cleanly. None-the-less they both behave similarly. First, they hijack the normal flow of control in such a way that it never returns back to the caller. And second they are both examples of a kind of weakening in the type system since any type can be substituted for X. Formally they are both examples of functions that diverge (functions that return normally are said to converge).

The Type

Here's a third example of a diverging function in Java. Translate as necessary for your language (in Java System.exit(n) stops the program immediately and returns n to the calling process).

X foo(){ System.exit(1); return null; }

Yet another case where foo() won't compute anything, it diverges. In fact, the return statement after the exit call is dead code. However, this is example is slightly different than the other examples because we had to create the dead code for the compiler to be happy[3] and, in fact for a different "X" like int the return value might have to be changed. That bit of dead code is closely related to the heart of this article.

Java can detect some kinds of dead code. If you write "X foo() { throw new RuntimeException(); return null; };" then Java recognizes that the return is unreachable and complains. In my System.exit(1) example Java didn't recognize that the call to exit() will never return so it required a following return statement. Obviously "throw" is a keyword and can get special attention that a mere library function can't but it would be useful to be able to let Java know that, like throw, exit() diverges.

One of the best ways to tell a compiler how a function behaves is by using types and, in type theory, there's a type that expresses just what we need. The type is called bottom (often written ⊥), and while there are different ways to look at the bottom type I'm going to go with a subtyping based view that should be accessible to C++, C#, and Java programmers.

If a language has subtyping and a function says it will return a type "X" then the function is allowed to return a "Y" instead as long as Y is a subtype of X. In my example of a function that just throws an exception the return type could be anything at all. So if we wanted System.exit(1) to indicate that it diverges the same way throw does, then its return type should be a subtype of all types. And indeed, that's exactly what bottom is.[4] bottom is a subtype of String, and int, and File, and List<Foo>, and every other type. Usefully, conventional type hierarchies are written with supertypes above subtypes, which makes a convenient mnemonic for "bottom" which needs to go below everything on such a hierarchy.

Now, if you're used to OO thinking then you expect a value with a certain subtype to in some sense be substitutable everywhere that a supertype is expected. But how can any one object behave like a String, an int, a File, etc? Remember that bottom indicates divergence: an expression with type bottom can never compute a value. So if exit()'s return type was bottom it would be totally safe to write "String foo() { return System.exit(1); }" while another bit of code could have "int bar() {return System.exit(1); }."

Making it Useful, A Divergence to Scala Divergence

Occasionally it might be useful to indicate that a function diverges. Examples are functions like System.exit(1), or functions that always throw an exception, perhaps after logging something or doing some useful calculation to create the exception. But interestingly out of all the statically typed languages that have any following outside of pure research only Scala has an explicit bottom type, which it calls Nothing. The reason Scala has a bottom type is tied to its ability to express variance in type parameters.

For some reason a lot of programmers run screaming into the night when you say "covariance" or "contravariance." It's silly. I won't get into all the details of variance, but I will say that in Scala the declaration "class List[+T] {...}" means that List[Subtype] is a subtype of List[Supertype]. No screaming necessary. And List[+T] brings me to one extremely practical use of bottom - what type should an empty List have?

Well, an empty List can have type List[String] or List[Foo] or List[int]. T can be whatever. And what's a subtype of whatever for all values of whatever? You guessed it: bottom (Nothing). Indeed, Scala has one constant called Nil whose type is List[Nothing]: a subtype of List[String], List[int], and List[whatever]. It all ties up in a bow when you consider that a List[T] has a method called head which returns the first element of the list as type T. But an emtpy list has no first value, it must throw an exception. And sure enough, head in List[Nothing] has type Nothing.

C# 4.0 is supposed to be getting definition site variance similar to Scala's but using the clever mnemonic keywords "in" and "out". I haven't heard anything yet on whether it will also add a bottom type, but it would make a lot of sense.

Java has usage site variance using wildcards. You can say "List<? extends Supertype> x" to indicate that x can have a List<Supertype> or a List<Subtype>. The bottom type would be useful in Java, too, although not as compelling since wildcards are so verbose people rarely use them even when they would make sense. Plus, Java folk tend to mutate everything and List[Nothing] in part makes sense in Scala because Scala Lists are immutable.

C++ does not have any simple way to express this kind of variance so the bottom type is even less compelling in C++ than it is in Java.

Back On Track

Haskell and languages in the ML family don't have an explicit bottom type. Their type systems don't have subtyping so adding bottom as a subtype would confuse things. None-the-less, they do have a nice way to express bottom that can be teleported back to Java, C#, and C++ (but not C). Recall that bottom is a subtype of all types. Another way of saying that is that if a function returns type bottom then for all types A, the function returns something compatible with A so why not express that directly? In Haskell the "error" function takes a string and throws an exception.

Prelude> :type error
error :: [Char] -> a

In Haskell, a lower case identifier in type position is always a type parameter, and [Char] means "list of Char", aka String. So for all types a, if "error" doesn't diverge then it will take a String and return an a. That can pretty much be expressed directly in Java

Haskell also has a function called "undefined" that simply throws an exception with the message "undefined." It's useful when you want get started writing some code without fully specifying it.

Prelude> :type undefined
undefined :: a

The function isn't as interesting as the type, which promises that for any type a "undefined" can compute an a or diverge. Since "undefined" can't possible just produce a value of any arbitrary type, it has no choice but to diverge. The same idea can be added to Java

Given the requirement to write the "return" keyword in C#, Java, and C++ I'm not sure how practical something like a generified error function really is as compared to having it return an exception and making the user write 'throw error("blah")', nor whether "undefined" is that much more useful than just throwing an UndefinedException, but this does illustrate the relationship between the bottom type and functions that, in Haskell terms, compute "forall a.a" or in C#/Java/C++ terms return the type parameter A without taking an A as an argument.

Also, as always care should be taken when transliterating from one language to another. Java would allow a function like "undefined" to return a null instead of diverging. C++ would allow it to return anything all and would only fail to compile if it were used in an incompatible way. That contrasts with languages like Haskell and ML in which the only way to implement "undefined :: a" is to make it diverge in some form or fashion[5].

The Bottom Value

I've spent some time talking about the bottom type as having no values. But it does have expressions like "undefined()" and that leads to a rather philosophical notion of how to think of bottom as having a value. Sorta. Skip this section if you don't like total gray beard philosophizing. If you're brave, then stick with me and imagine a subset of your favorite C derived language that does not allow side effects. No mutation, no IO, and no exceptions. In this strange world functions either just compute values or they diverge by not halting. In such a world the order of evaluation mostly isn't important as long as data dependencies are met - in f(a(), b()), you can compute a() before b() or b() before a(), whatever, they can't interfere with each other. Doesn't matter. The only time order of evaluation is forced on us is when there are data dependencies, so "a() + b()" must compute a() and b() (or b() and a()) before their sum can be computed. Nice.

Well, almost. Order of evaluation can matter for expressions that diverge. Let me give an example.

Because f ignores its argument, if we call "f(infiniteLoop());" there are two possible outcomes. If "infiniteLoop()" is eagerly evaluated before f is called then the program will diverge. On the other hand, if the expression "infiniteLoop()" is lazily remembered as being potentially needed later then f can successfully return 42 and the diverging expression can be forgotten just like it never happened (because it didn't).

We've gone to the pain of eliminating side effects from our language so it's a little irritating to have to keep thinking about evaluation order just to deal with divergence, so we perform a little mental trick; a little white lie. Imagine that functions like infiniteLoop above don't get stuck, they compute a value called ⊥, which is the only value of type bottom.

Now, since the bottom type is a subtype of all types and ⊥ is the bottom value, then it follows that every type must be extended with ⊥. Boolean = {⊥, true, false}, int = {⊥, 0, 1, -1, 2, -2, ...}, and unit = {⊥, ()}. That means we need some rules for ⊥ and how it interacts with everything else. In the vast majority of languages including Java, C#, and C++ but also impure functional languages like F# and OCaml doing just about anything with ⊥ can only compute ⊥. In other words, for all functions f, f(⊥) = ⊥. If you write f(infiniteLoop()) in those languages then the result is ⊥. This kind of rule is called "strictness".

In contrast, Haskell is often called a "lazy language," meaning that expressions aren't evaluated until they're needed. That's not quite technically correct. The Haskell spec just says that it is "non-strict." The spec doesn't care when expressions are evaluated so long as programs allow ⊥ to slide as far as possible. An expression like f(infiniteLoop) must evaluate to 42. Haskell basically forces an expression involving ⊥ to evaluate to ⊥ only when the argument must be used[6]. The distinction between "lazy" and "non-strict" is subtle, but by being "non-strict" rather than "lazy" a Haskell compiler can use eager evaluation anytime it can prove that doing so doesn't change behavior in the face of ⊥. If a function always uses its first argument in a comparison, then Haskell is free to use eager evaluation on that argument. Since Haskell truly does forbid side effects(unlike our imagined neutered language above), the choice of evaluation strategy is up to the compiler and invisible except for performance consequences[7].

C++, Java, and C# have just a tiny bit of non-strictness. In these languages "true || ⊥" is true and "false && ⊥" is false. If these languages were totally strict then "true || ⊥" would be ⊥. Users of these languages call this behavior "short circuiting" and it's done for performance reasons rather than being a philosophical goal, but it's still a curious departure from their normal rules.

There you have it. The bottom value ⊥ is a clever mental hack to allow purely declarative functional code to be reasoned about without injecting sequencing into the logic. It allows people to talk about the difference between a purely declarative strict language and a purely declarative non-strict language without getting into details of evaluation order. But since we're talking about languages that aren't so purely declarative, we can take off our philosopher hats and return back to the world where side effects are unrestricted, bottom is a type with no values and divergence means that flow of control goes sideways.

Tuples and Aesthetics

Last time I talked about the unit type and how, if you interpret types as logical propositions, the unit type behaves as a "true" and tuple types act as logical and "∧." I also talked about an algebraic interpretation where unit type acts like 1 and tuple types act like multiplication "×". So the type (A,B) can also be written as A∧B or A×B. The type (A,unit) is isomorphic to A, A×1 = A, and A∧True <=> A.

Bottom has similar interpretations as 0 or False. The type (A,bottom) is isomorphic to the bottom type because you can't compute any values of type (A,bottom). A×0 = 0, and A∧False <=> False. Nice how it all hangs together, eh?

Bottom behaves like False in another way. In logic if you assume that False is true you can prove anything. Similarly in type systems the bottom type allows the programmer to promise to do even the impossible. For instance, here's a Java function signature that promises to convert anything to anything.

public static <A,B> B convert(A arg) {...}

If you ignore dynamic casting and null (they're both weird in different ways) there's no meaningful way to implement that function except by diverging. More on this in an upcoming episode.

Conclusion

I somehow don't think anybody will be running into the office saying "I just read an article on the bottom type, so now I know how to solve our biggest engineering challenge." But the bottom type is still interesting. It's a kind of hole in your static type system that follows inevitably from the Turing Halting Problem[8]. It says that a function can't promise to compute a string, it can only promise to not compute something that isn't a string. It might compute nothing at all. And that in turn leads to the conclusion that in a Turing complete language static types don't classify values (as much as we pretend they do) they classify expressions.

Footnotes

Oddly, in C, C#, and Java X can't be "void" because its an error to return an expression of type void. C++ does allow void to make writing templates a bit easier.

Yes, I can make it a void function and not have a return. But again that would illustrate how exit() is different from a throw: throw doesn't require the return type to be void.

Note I'm saying "subtype" here and not "subclass." int, List<String>, and List<File> are 3 different types. In C++, Java, and C# int doesn't have a class. In Java and C# List<String> and List<File> both come from the same class. Yet bottom must be a subtype of all 3 so it can't be a subclass.

A plea to my readers: I'm too lazy to see if "forall a.a" is bottom in F# or C#, or if, like Java, null would be allowed. My bet is that null won't be allowed because only Java has the peculiar notion that type parameters must be bound to reference types.

Very loosely speaking. Please see the Haskell Report for all the gory details about when Haskell implementations are allowed to diverge.

Haskell has another clever hack where throwing an exception isn't an effect, but catching one is. Since order of evaluation is unspecified in Haskell, the same program with the same inputs could conceivably cause different exceptions. Exceptions are theoretically non-deterministic in Haskell.

A language that isn't Turing complete can prove termination and does not need a bottom type, but such a language isn't powerful enough to have a program that can interpret the language.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

I suspect most people who come to one of the statically typed functional languages like SML, OCaml, Haskell, F#, or Scala will have only seen static typing in one of the popular C derived languages like C++, Java, or C#. Some differences in type system become clear fast. One particular spot is the relationship and difference between void and unit.

What does the word "void" mean? To any C, C++, Java, C# programmer it means that printHello doesn't return anything. Simple.

But a functional programmer[2] sees it quite differently. This article will explain the different point of view and why it's useful.

What's a Function?

It turns out to be very hard to write a single definition of "function" that covers all the ways the word has been used. But to a functional programmer at the very least a function is something that maps inputs to outputs. In the impure functional languages that function may also have an effect like printing "hello." I'll stick with the impure definition in this article.

Now, when a functional programmer talks about mapping inputs to outputs he or she doesn't mean taking a string as an input and outputting it on the console. Instead he or she is talking about arguments and returns of a function. If something is to have any pretense at being a function, or at least a function that returns normally, then it must return something.

printHello clearly does return normally so a functional programmer insists that it returns something. But a functional programmer also must recognize that it doesn't return anything "meaningful."

Thus rather than the concept "void," a functional programmer thinks of unit. In some languages the unit type is written as (), but for clarity I'm going to stick with "unit." Now, unit is a type, conceptually not much different from say "int". But unit, as its name somewhat implies, has exactly one value conventionally represented as an empty pair of parentheses ().

In OO terms () is a "singleton". There's only one instance of it. It's also immutable. In a very real sense it carries no information. You can't write a program that behaves differently based on what a function of type unit returns - it always returns the same ().

A Performance Diversion

At this point a little guy in the back of your head might be asking "doesn't returning something meaningless just waste cycles?" Well, it's important to distinguish between abstraction and implementation. The unit value, (), is an abstraction that the implementation is free to optimize away. If you write in Scala

def printHello : Unit = {
println("hello")
()
}

Then the compiler will generate the equivalent of the original void based code. If in Scala you write

print(printHello)

Then the compiler might generate something like

printHello
print( () )

Because () is a singleton it doesn't matter at the machinecode/bytecode level that it's not "actually" returned. The compiler can figure it out with no performance hit at all.

Making It Useful

Okay, blah, blah, blah, functional think this, unit that. Whatever. What's the point? () is a value with no information, unit is a type with only that value...what's the practical use?

Well, it turns out that its useful for writing generic[3] code. Java and C++, somewhat famously, do not have first class functions. But they can be faked. Here's the Java

So here's the question: how would I convert the printHello function earlier into a Function<String,X>/Function<string, X> */Funct<string, X>. What type is X?

If you've been playing along so far you recognize that it "should be" void, but Java and C# don't allow it. It's invalid to write Function<String, void> in either language.

Let's pretend you could. After all, C++ will let you write a class PrintHello : Function<std::string, void>. But there's still a problem even in C++. Generic code might expect a result and none of these languages let you denote a value of type void. For instance (in Java) imagine thise simple bit of reusable code.

C++ has std::transform and C# has IEnumerable#Map, which are more or less the same idea.

Anyway, given something like the above calling map/transform/Map with a list of strings and the printHello object should result in a List<void> of the same length as the original list. But what's in the list? The answer, in a functional language, is a bunch of references to (). Tada, the meaningless is useful for writing generic code.

C++ will allow a Function<std::string, void> but any attempt to call something like map with it will fail to compile. C++ doesn't have a () value so our generic code has become slightly less generic.

The Work Arounds

Java, C++, and C# programmers do solve this problem all the time. One common option is to not use Function<string, void> but some other concept like "Action<string>" to mean a function that takes a string, performs a side effect, and returns nothing useful. Then you essentially duplicate "map" into something called perhaps "foreach" that expects an Action<T> and returns void. That probably makes sense in this case since a list of references to a meaningless value is perhaps silly, but it also means a great deal of code duplication if this kind of higher order programming is common. For instance, you can't write just one compose function that creates a function from two other functions, you also have to write a compose that takes an action and a function to create an action.

Another answer is to make the printHello function object have type Function<String,Object>/Function<string,void*>/Func<string,object> and return a null. That's pretty disgusting.

Perhaps the best option is to create your own Unit enumeration with only a single value. That does leave Unit nullable in Java, but railing against nullability in Java is another blog post.

enum Unit { unit }; // C++, Java, or C#

As for good old C, well, the type system doesn't do parametric polymorphism so generic code in C is problematic no matter what you do. Still, with function pointers it's conceivable you might find a use for a unit value. Typically a C programmer would use 0.

A Quick Aside About Purity

For the most part I've casually used effects everywhere. Most functional languages like SML, OCaml, F#, and Scala are impure and let the programmer get away with that. Some functional languages, e.g. Haskell without unsafe* extensions, do not. They must track effects using the type system. But even with this caveat, the unit type is still useful to, for instance, distinguish from a function that fetches a string from the keyboard which would have might have type IO String vs one that prints to the console which might have type String -> IO Unit.

Conclusion

Void and unit are essentially the same concept. They're used to indicate that a function is called only for its side effects. The difference is that unit actually has a value. That means that unit functions can be used generically wherever a generic first class function is required. The C derived languages miss out by treating void functions as functions that don't return anything instead of as functions that don't return anything meaningful.

Next time I'll talk about functions that really, truly return nothing.

Postscript on Aesthtics and Tuples

Mostly I've talked about the practical value of the unit type in this article, but I do love it when convenient practice and beautiful theory line up. So here's an attack from a different direction.

Many functional languages have tuples. A tuple is an ordered fixed size collection of values of (possibly) different types[5]. Tuple types are usually written with parens. For instance, (Foo, Bar) is the type of pairs (2-tuples) with one Foo, one Bar. The same type is sometimes written as Foo × Bar, which makes sense too. You can see the type as a set that consists of a kind of Cartesian product of the Foo and Bar sets. For instance if Foo has only two possible values {f1, f2} and Bar has only two possible values {b1, b2} then the type Foo × Bar has 4 possible values, {(f1, b1), (f1, b2), (f2, b1), and (f2, b2)}.

You can have tuples that with higher numbers of members like triples and 4 tuples and such.

What about a 1-tuple? Well, the type Foo can be seen as a 1-tuple. There's would be no useful difference between the type Foo and the type (Foo).

The question to ask is, given that we have 3-tuples, 2-tuples, and 1-tuples does it make sense to have a 0 tuple? The answer, dear reader, is unit. The unit value is a tuple with no members. That's why Haskell calls both the type and the value "()" - it's like the type (A,B) without the A,B. And just as an empty list and empty set aren't quite "nothing" neither is the empty tuple.

And here's another interesting thing, type theorists will also call the unit type "1" (not to be confused with the value 1). To see why, look at the type (Foo, unit) which can also be written as Foo × 1. If Foo only has 2 possible values {f1, f2} then the entire set of possible values for the type Foo × 1 is {(f1, ()), (f2, ())}. It's the same 2 values extended with a little bit of "meaningless" information that can be stripped off or added back in as desired. Formally speaking it's isomorphic to the type Foo. To abuse notation slightly, Foo × 1 = Foo. So unit is not only the type that has only 1 value, it's the type that behaves like a 1 at the type level.

Footnotes

In C of course it would be char *name, in C++ it might be char * or I might use the string and iostream libraries. Whatever. The differences aren't that relevant to this discussion.

To save myself a lot of time I'm using phrases like "functional language" to mean the statically typed functional languages that have been influenced to a large extent by ML. Some of what I'm talking about does translate into some dynamically typed languages as well, although they often "pun" things so that there isn't a unit value that's distinct from nil, null, false or some other singleton value.

I use the phrase "generic" here to mean what the functional community means by "parametrically polymorphic" or just "polymorphic." However, my target audience is more likely to associate polymorphism with OO dispatch, so "generic" it is.

In C++ you can also do it without the pure virtual base class and just use template structural typing based on operator(), but shortly it'll be easier for me to describe a problem if I use a base class to give the concept a name. I could also allocate on the stack but that slightly confuses my point. I'm going this route to keep things symmetrical among the languages. Besides, this isn't a tutorial on why C++ isn't Java. On a related note it's a shame C++0x won't have concepts.

This is quite different from a Python tuple which is really just a list.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

In response to my last article on Groovy's lack of static typing James Strachan, the original Groovy guy, tweeted "groovy should fix this really IMHO." Well, perhaps. But "fixing" it would substantially change Groovy's semantics. Most importantly it would prevent Groovy from executing some programs that work just fine right now.

An Example

Here's a simple example of a program that works now but wouldn't under a static typing regime. It's a simple variation on the program from the previous article.

Conclusion

That's the nature of the beast. Static typing rejects some good programs that might otherwise work. And as my last article showed, dynamic typing allows some bad programs that can't possibly work. That's a pretty fundamental difference and there's no way around it.

If the Groovy community wants to make its type annotations work in a more statically typed manner that's ok. This article just shows that such a change wouldn't be 100% compatible with today's Groovy.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Every now and then somebody writes that Groovy supports optional static typing. But it doesn't. They've confused the use of type annotations on variables with a static type system.

This article is emphatically not an entry in the long, sad, and mostly insipid static vs. dynamic debate. It is a clarification of a misunderstanding.

Definitions

The word "static" in "static type system" is related to phrases like "static analysis." Basically, without executing the code in question, a static type system analyzes code to prove that certain kinds of misbehaviors won't ever happen.

The word "dynamic" in "dynamic type system" is related to the "dynamic execution" of a program. In contrast to a static type system, a "dynamic type system" automatically tests properties when expressions are being (dynamically) evaluated.[1]

The Proof

With those definitions its easy to show that adding type annotations to a Groovy program does not make it statically typed. Create a file named test.groovy. In it define a couple of unrelated classes

class Foo {}
class Bar {}

Now write a function that promises to take a Bar and return a Foo. Add a println for fun.

Foo test(Bar x) { return x }
println("Everything's groovy")

Compile it and run it (explicitly compiling isn't necessary, it just reinforces my point)

~/test$ groovyc test.groovy
~/test$ groovy test
Everything's groovy

There were no complaints at all. A static type system would have rejected the program.

Open up test.groovy and make a slight adjustment so that the function is actually called

The Misunderstanding

There's an oft repeated phrase that "in a statically typed language variables are typed." There's also a common misunderstanding that static typing and type annotations are the same thing. I can show a simple counter example to both misconceptions with one language: Haskell.

Create a file named Test.hs. Here's a function called flatten. It flattens a list of lists one "level" to just be a list.[2]

flatten = foldl (++) []

No variables were harmed during the creation of that function. It's written in what's called "point free" style. Yet with neither variables nor type annotations I can show it's statically typed by defining a bogus main function

main = print $ flatten [1,2,3,4,5,6]

And trying to compile

~/test$ ghc Test.hs -o test
Test.hs:3:24:
No instance for (Num [a])
arising from the literal `1' at Test.hs:3:24
Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Num [a])
In the expression: 1
In the first argument of `flatten', namely `[1, 2, 3, 4, ....]'
In the second argument of `($)', namely
`flatten [1, 2, 3, 4, ....]'

Thus you need neither variables nor annotations to have static typing. A small change fixes things right up

The error happens without executing anything so it's a form of static analysis, and it's caused by failure to adhere to the Runnable type's requirements hence it's a static type error. But it's not an optional static type check - you can't turn it off.

Interesting, no?

Conclusion

Whatever you feel positively or negatively about Groovy please don't perpetuate the myth that it has optional static types. It doesn't. Groovy's optional type annotations are used for dynamic testing not static proofs. It's just that with type annotations Groovy dynamically tests are for "dynamic type" tags attached to objects rather than its more normal mechanism of dynamically testing for the presence of certain methods. What little static typing Groovy does have is not optional.

Update: Some time after this article was written, a team announced Groovy++, an extension to Groovy that really does have optional static typing.

Footnotes

[1] In a certain formal sense the phrase "dynamic type system" is an oxymoron and "static type system" is redundant. However, the phrases are commonly used and there doesn't seem to be a commonly recognized concise phrase to describe what a "dynamic type system" does. Pedants will argue for "untyped" but that doesn't give me a concept on which to hang the different ways that say Groovy, Ruby, and Scheme automatically deal with runtime properties.

[2] A more general function called join already exist for all monads in Control.Monad module. It can be defined as "join m = m >>= id"

Algebraic Data Types

What about Algebraic Data Types, common to functional languages - including my beloved OCaml variant types?

Erlang doesn't have them. You can fake them with tuples and atoms and such, but they just aren't part of Erlang.

Conclusion

Clearly, by Fischer's definition, Erlang is not a functional language.

But that's ridiculous.

David MacIver has an excellent post suggesting that there's a problem of language. Fischer hasn't defined what he means by "functional language" other than "feelings" so we're left with something nebulous.

I think MacIver is right, but Fischer does seem to have an informal definition. His definition of "functional language" is "OCaml". His post compares Scala to OCaml and concludes that because Scala is not OCaml Scala must not be functional.

Yet if I take his specific points I can find other functional languages, like Erlang, that are not OCaml either and therefor not functional either.

In fact, if I look at Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure and Arc I find that they violate most of his demands too. So the whole Lisp family isn't functional either.

Fischer has fallen prey to a common mistake. He's overgeneralized from one datapoint. It's as if a Scheme programmer concluded that OCaml isn't functional because it doesn't have hygienic macros or a Java programmer concluded that Ruby isn't object oriented because it doesn't have inner classes.

Footnotes

[1] Actually, you can write "def f(a:Int)(b:Int) = a + b" in Scala if you want a curried function or you can write "val y = f(1, _)" if you want to partially apply an uncurried function. So Fischer blows major points here.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.

1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.

1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.

1940s - Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2].

1970 - Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman create Scheme. Their work leads to a series of "Lambda the Ultimate" papers culminating in "Lambda the Ultimate Kitchen Utensil." This paper becomes the basis for a long running, but ultimately unsuccessful run of late night infomercials. Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.

1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

1972 - Alain Colmerauer designs the logic language Prolog. His goal is to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says "No." to every query.

1973 - Robin Milner creates ML, a language based on the M&M type theory. ML begets SML which has a formally specified semantics. When asked for a formal semantics of the formal semantics Milner's head explodes. Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic.

1980 - Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term "object oriented." When asked what that means he replies, "Smalltalk programs are just objects." When asked what objects are made of he replies, "objects." When asked again he says "look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles."

1983 - In honor of Ada Lovelace's ability to create programs that never ran, Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense create the Ada programming language. In spite of the lack of evidence that any significant Ada program is ever completed historians believe Ada to be a successful public works project that keeps several thousand roving defense contractors out of gangs.

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer. Skynet's motives for performing the service remain unclear but spokespeople from the future say "there is nothing to be concerned about, baby," in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer overrun.

1986 - Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic.

1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by legions of followers, and announces to the world that "There Is Only One Way to Do It." Poland becomes nervous.

1995 - At a neighborhood Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that his plate of spaghetti is an excellent model for understanding the World Wide Web and that web applications should mimic their medium. On the back of his napkin he designs Programmable Hyperlinked Pasta (PHP). PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day.

1995 - Yukihiro "Mad Matz" Matsumoto creates Ruby to avert some vaguely unspecified apocalypse that will leave Australia a desert run by mohawked warriors and Tina Turner. The language is later renamed Ruby on Rails by its real inventor, David Heinemeier Hansson. [The bit about Matsumoto inventing a language called Ruby never happened and better be removed in the next revision of this article - DHH].

1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.

2003 - A drunken Martin Odersky sees a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ad featuring somebody's peanut butter getting on somebody else's chocolate and has an idea. He creates Scala, a language that unifies constructs from both object oriented and functional languages. This pisses off both groups and each promptly declares jihad.

Friday, April 24, 2009

When enthusiasts talk about Scala they frequently start with "it's a lot like Java but with all this other cool stuff like type inference and structural types and..." I guess it's okay to introduce Scala that way. I've done it myself. But it does give the impression that Scala has somehow heaped complexity onto the Java. Oddly enough, it hasn't, at least not in the areas of type inference and structural types. Java has both. Sorta. They're just not very useful.

In this short article I'm going to try to show that while type inference and structural types appear to be additions to Scala over and above Java, they can also be explained as the removal of peculiar restrictions from Java. The goal is not just to illustrate these two points, but to make a broad statement: Scala isn't a just bunch of features heaped on top of Java. To a significant degree it's a generalization of things already found in Java. The result is that many aspects of Scala are both simpler and more regular than Java.

Type Inference

Java folk get excited about Scala's type inference. Usually positively, but sometimes negatively. But here's the thing: every practical statically typed language has some type inference. Every one. Even Java has type inference. It's just very limited. Let me show you by starting with a simple class

It's silly code but it illustrates my point. Java doesn't need me to explicitly annotate the return type of each call to bar(). Java infers the type resulting from new Foo().bar() as being a Foo, which in turn can be sent a bar() message resulting in a Foo, etc. If I change things just a little the type system complains

System.out.println(new Foo().bar().bar().baz()); // bzzt error!

In Java I "only" have to annotate types when I want to assign to a variable or return from a method. Which, come to think of it, is an odd restriction. The compiler obviously knows the type, so why do I have to tell it yet again?

Foo f = new Foo().bar().bar().bar();

Thus, rather than saying Scala adds type inference we can equally well say that it removes a silly restriction from Java's type inference[1].

Structural Refinement Types

The fact that you don't have to annotate types when building expressions in Java is well known even if people don't usually call it type inference. What's not as well known is that Java has refinement types. So I'll have to explain, this time starting with Scala.

In Scala you can say method doSomething takes any object with a bar method, like so

def doSomething(x : {def bar : Unit}) = ...

That's called structural typing - the doSomething method puts a constraint on the structure of objects that may be passed to it. But actually, in Scala, that's just shorthand for the following refinement type

def doSomething(x : AnyRef {def bar : Unit}) = ...

That says that x must be a subtype of AnyRef and must have a bar method. The type of x is a "refinement" of AnyRef with an additional structural constraint. Scala's refinement types aren't limited to just refining AnyRef, but that's really not important to my point here. My point is that Java has refinement types, too.

If you're a Java programmer, you're probably scratching your head thinking I've lost my sanity. But I promise I haven't. I ask you, in Java what exactly is the type of this expression?

new Object() {
public void bar() {
System.out.println("bar!");
}
}

If you said "Object!" think again. In Java it's actually something more sophisticated. Go paste this into your favorite Java IDE and run it. I'll wait

Surprised? Remember my point about limited type inference above? Here, Java has clearly inferred that the result of the expression is an Object refined with a bar method[2]. And so it lets you send a bar() message to the object. Rename either the method or the call to "baz" and you get a type error. But if you want to do anything interesting with the (new Object {public void bar() {...}};) object, like assign it to a variable, return it from a method, or apply it as an argument to a method then Java has a problem. It has no way to denote the refinement. So the refinement gets "lost" from the static type system. Poof. Gone. It's part of the object, you can find it via reflection, but the static type system won't let you get at it. The static type system only lets you get at a refinement "immediately" in a surrounding expression. Which is pretty close to useless. When you look at it that way, Scala hasn't so much added refinement types as removed another silly Java restriction.

Conclusion

When Java people first start looking into Scala it's common to think of Scala as being some complicated mishmash. In large part, evangelists (including me) are to blame. It's surprisingly hard to convey a nice feature of language A to users of language B without making it sound like something totally new, hence something that will complicate their lives. Hopefully this article has helped illustrate that in a very real sense some of the things that appear to be "new" in Scala are really "old" but generalized to be made more useful.

So this article is a call to all Scala pundits out there: when comparing Scala to another language, especially Java, go ahead and get excited about a "new" feature...but then see if you can't explain it as a generalization of an "old" one. You might be surprised how often you can and your audience might come away less intimidated.

Foot Notes

Technically, Scala's type inference is quite a bit more sophisticated than Java's. But I won't let inconvenient facts like that get in the way of making a good point.

Technically, I think the Java spec says that the type isn't structural, but some anonymous nominative type that the compiler can infer and use over a very limited scope. Then again, maybe not. I'm too lazy to go re-read the spec. Also, as already established, I won't let inconvenient facts like that get in the way of making a good point.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

I managed to offend a few Erlangers by talking about actors as being shared stateful objects a couple of articles back. Now I'm going to continue the tradition by talking about the actor locking model. And I'm not just talking about Erlang, but any of the libraries that have sprung up for other languages to support actor style concurrency. Let me emphasize again that I like both Erlang and actors. But I dislike the number of times I read from enthusiasts that you "can't have deadlocks in Erlang because it doesn't have any locks." Of course you can because it does. This article will explain.

Locks

There are all manner of locks in the world: mutexes, monitors, synchronization barriers, read/write locks etc., etc., yada yada yada. All of them boil down to a spot in the program where if conditions aren't good-to-go the currently executing thread stops executing until some other thread (or threads) change the condition the lock is waiting on[1]. Erlang has a locking primitive, too. It stops the execution of the current thread and waits for the right conditions to move on. The primitive is called (drum roll please)...'receive'.

"But, but, 'receive' receives messages - it's not a lock." Sure, it receives messages. True. But it also brings the currently running thread to a screeching halt until it receives a message it wants to handle. "receive foo -> doSomething()" waits until the atom "foo" is at the front of the current process's mailbox - any other message gets thrown to the back of a "this receive can't handle that message" queue for processing by some other receive. In other words "receive foo ->" is a lock that waits for the condition "foo at head of mailbox queue" before it unlocks.

Deadlocks

A deadlock is when there's a cycle in the locking dependencies of 2 or more threads. Thread 1 is locked waiting for condition 1 after which it will set condition 2, Thread 2 is waiting for condition 2 after which it will set condition 3, etc until you get Thread n which is waiting for condition n after which it will set condition 1. Everybody's waiting on somebody else to go first so nobody can go.

Based on this, a deadlock in Erlang is easy to create. Just spawn two actors that are each waiting for a message from the other

If a running system doesn't have any other actors that will send Foo or Bar the right message then they are deadlocked until some poor sleepy eyed admin comes along to break the deadlock with "Foo ! {Bar, foo}". Now, in this case the deadlock is not a big deal. The resources these actors consume are pretty tiny and they don't really do anything useful even when they unlock. But if these actors were meant to do something actually useful such a deadlock could seriously impair the functionality of a system.

This was a toy example, of course. It's easy to see the deadlock. In a "real world" large scale application it might not be so obvious where the deadlocks lurk. Actor's can end up in very complicated, dynamically changing relationships. Couple that with the possibility for race conditions and you'll see that deadlock is a real concern. Erlang style actors make concurrency much easier to deal with, but they don't remove the need for careful design and testing.

That's pretty much all I really wanted to say in this article, but I can't feel my work here is done until I've committed further atrocities against Erlang.

Perverting Erlang

A couple of posts ago I had a problem with race conditions on a shared stateful actor. Here's what it looked like.

While there are many good solutions, one evil solution is to use a mutex. You see, one well known aspect of concurrent programming is that once you have one locking primitive, many others are pretty easy to build. To the perversion mobile!

When a Mutex actor is the unlocked state then any actor can tell it to lock. Once in the locked state it won't unlock until the first actor tells it to. [2] The counting business is so that one process can lock a mutex several times and then must unlock the mutex the same number of times before it is considered unlocked.

And now a bit of test code. I've modified the original sockmachine test code so that before inserting coins and pushing buttons a testloop must acquire the lock on a mutex and once done must release it.

Kids, Don't Try This At Home

There are better ways to solve this kind of problem with actors. Seriously. Why use a custom mutex when Erlang has a lock built in as described above? Just change the sock machine to not be so stateful, i.e. make it take one message "{From, coin, coin, pushbutton}" and do all the work necessary before returning the tube of socks. Particularly nasty about this manual mutex code is that it's hard to ensure that all code paths will unlock a mutex. If my test code had thrown an exception at the wrong point then the mutex would be left locked. So don't do this. Unless you're evil. Like me.

Conclusions

Erlang's a great language. Actors are a great model. But they are neither race nor deadlock free. That's because, fundamentally, they're all about shared mutable state and locking. If after all of these articles you still don't believe me or you think I'm using the words wrong then please send your comments to dev/null.

In my next article I'll try to pervert Erlang for good rather than for evil and maybe try to explain the frequent observation that "yeah, races and deadlocks can happen with Erlang, but it seems less common than with more traditional shared memory/manual locking mechanisms."

Footnotes

Erlangers use the word "process" because of the memory isolation enforced between different actors. I'm using "thread" here to avoid confusion with OS processes. But even here there's confusion because I mean logical threads which may or may not be the same as hardware threads. I've seen a few libraries call this concept "sparks."

Or until some third actor spoofs an unlock message from the locking actor.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

In a private email, somebody asked of my previous article "Okay, I can see that there must be state since you've created a state machine. But you aren't mutating any variables so where does the state come from?" It's a good question. If you feel you "got it" then skip this article. But if you're still hesitant or think I'm misusing the word "state" please read on.

First, let me remind that I contend that state is 1) something responding to the same inputs differently over time as far as another observer is concerned and 2) an abstraction and not the representation. None-the-less, state always ends up with some representation. For instance, files can represent state. And even users of programs can hold state (quick, I'm in a drunken state and I plan to write a long rant, who am I?).

I want to ignore all but memory based state and show that, ultimately, even the Erlang code must manipulate mutable memory and that message sending effective leaks a little bit of that detail. Now, on Reddit an offended Erlanger called me a Java fanboy. As any of my loyal readers know, it is true that I think Java is the most incredibly awesome language EVER and I can hardly stop writing glowing things about it. But for this article I'll struggle against my natural instincts and use Ruby, Haskell, assembly, and Erlang.

I'll use Ruby to illustrate some points about state and representation. First the tired old state diagram and then some Ruby

If you don't read Ruby then Ruby control flow structures generally result in the value of their last contained expression so explicit returns aren't needed. :foo is a symbol (kinda like a string). @state declares a field (which is private) named state. I called it state because it so clearly matches to the state space specified by the diagram. But here's another way to write SockMachine with a completely different representation

Instances of this class keep track of the total number of coins or button pushes ever accepted and use the modulus operator to decide what to do about it. The representation is quite different from that of SockMachineSimple, but to anybody using this class the difference is mostly irrelevant - it still conforms to the same state diagram. Internally it has a very large number of states but externally it still has the same three. And here's one last stateful machine

By looking at the source it would appear that this version never mutate any variables after being initialized, but of course it does by calling methods on SockMachineComplex. Hiding the manipulation of representation is not the same thing as making something stateless. And now one last example, one that is totally different because it is not stateful.

Internally, pushbutton uses a stateful machine but externally it is not stateful. Short of using a debugger you can't observe the state changes in SockMachineStateless's internal machine. Actually, I guess you could monkey patch SockMachineComplex to do some kind of IO or callback to expose the workings so maybe I shouldn't have used Ruby to illustrate my OO points. Too late now.

Hiding State

Okay, but that's OO stuff. Erlang is a functional language and the code never appeared to have any mutable variables or nested mutable objects. So what gives? Well, to illustrate Erlang I'm going to use Haskell, another functional language. Haskell's great advantage to this exposition is that it's really, really easy to get at some nice clean assembly.

So here's a very silly Haskell function for determining if a positive Int is even or odd. Its implementation is silly, but it allows me to make a point.

As you can see, the Haskell code does use mutable "variables" at runtime. This is a common optimization technique in functional languages for dealing with direct tail recursion. But all that machinery is hidden from you as a programmer so just like SockMachineStateless the end result is stateless unless you peel back the covers with a debugger.

Finally, Some Damn Erlang

All right, I've written Ruby and Haskell, generated some assembly, and then written in an impossible chimeric language. But my original question was about Erlang. Here's a simple Erlang counter actor

Again, no variables are mutated. But if I assume that Erlang does the same kind of direct tail call optimization that Haskell does, the pseudo Erlang/Assembly loop looks like this

loop(N) ->
movl N, eax % copy n into the eax register
.looptop:
receive From ->
From ! eax, % send the current value in eax back to the original sender
inc eax % increment eax by 1
jmp .looptop % jump back to the top of the loop
end.

It's still a loop like the Haskell one, but there's an important difference. Each message receive sends back the current value of the mutable eax register then mutates it. So this behaves a bit like SockMachineDelegated - the original code didn't appear directly manipulate any mutable variables, but there was mutation under the covers and unlike SockMachineStateless but like SockMachineDelegated this change of state is visible beyond the local confines. [2]

Now, there are other ways to deal with recursion. I don't know Erlang's implementation, but it doesn't matter. Something is being mutated somewhere and that change is being made visible by messages being sent back. Typically non tail calls mutate the stack pointer so that it points to new stack frames that hold the current value of arguments, or then again some arguments might stay in registers. Tail calls that aren't direct tail recursion might mutate the stack region pointed to by an unchanging stack pointer. Whatever, it always involves mutation, and it's always hidden from the programmer when using pure functions. But actor loops are not pure functions. The sends and receives are side effects that can allow a little tiny bit of the mutable machine representation to be mapped to state that an observer can witness.

But Really Where Are The Mutable Variables?

So all that's fine, but it doesn't really show where the state is in my original Erlang code. The code didn't have an N to stick in a mutable register or a mutable stack frame. Here's the core of it.

For this final answer I'm afraid I have to do a bit of hand waving. The explanation is even more abstract than the mutable variable as register/stack local explanation. You see, no matter what, your code always mutates one register: the instruction pointer. Its job is to point to the next instruction to be executed. As the CPU executes instructions the IP moves around, typically just being bumped up a bit for everything but jumps which move it more substantially.

In purely functional code the IP moves around but these moves can't be observed by other parts of the program as they are happening. In other words, in purely functional code, the changing IP is invisible. It's a completely black box unless you use a low level debugger. It's very much like SockMachineStateless where the internals were mutable but invisible to the outside world.

But with message receives the IP can be induced to move around based on things communicated from outside the function. The IPs current instruction can then define in large part what a message received by a process will do. If the IP points at the receive in the "zerocoins()" function then that's one behavior and if it it points to the receive in the "twocoins()" function then that's another. The different behaviors can be observed by other actors via messages sent back to them. When an actor sends a SockMachine a coin or buttonpress message it may indirectly be causing the IP to be mutated. And when it gets back nothing, coin, or tubeofsocks it's really being told, in a very indirect way, something about the value of the IP.

Conclusion

State is not the same thing as representation. None-the-less, with an omniscient view of things you can always find the representation of state. It might be in bits stored on a drive, it might be in neurons in a user's head, or it might be in a computer's memory and registers. The representation might not be directly visible in the source you're looking at but hidden in low level machinery. It might just be the instruction pointer pointing at different parts of your code base.

If you equate state with representation you end up with the very un-useful property that everything is stateful since at some level of representation every bit of executing code on your computer involves stateful processes. This view robs you of the ability to think about high level languages, especially purely functional ones like Haskell, at an appropriate level of abstraction.[3]

Purely functional code ensures that that the state represented by registers and stack pointers and instruction pointers is kept local. But side effects like message sends and receives allow that low level machinery to be used as the representation of shared mutable state even if you don't see it in your code.

In the end, it's far more useful in most cases to think of state from the point of view of an observer than the point of view of its implementation. The SockMachine actor was stateful regardless of how that state was represented simply because other actors could observe it changing state. Digging down into how send and receive allow a modicum of access to the instruction pointer just isn't a useful model for thinking about stateful actors normally. So the short answer to the original question is "Who cares how the state was represented? It was shared mutable state."

Foot notes

Actually, it appears to be moving n back and forth between memory pointed to by eap and eax, which seems oddly wasteful given that it never branches out of this function. It also does 3 tests when only 2 should be necessary.

Technically the Erlang code probably can't keep the current value of N in a register when calling receive since receive may cause a task switch to another process, so assume that receive copies registers out to memory before executing then swaps them back in when its done.

Some people equate state with data, but that's just as bad. Code is data so all code must be stateful - another useless conclusion.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Actors have become quite the popular topic. Besides Erlang, there's a famous library implementation in Scala and at least 3 for Java. But the "no shared state" propaganda is setting people up for failure. In last week's exciting episode I defined both what state is and what it isn't. It is the fact that something responds differently to the same inputs over time. It is not the details of how that is represented. Based on that I can now show why saying that Erlang style actors don't share state is totally wrong headed - that, in fact, if you don't want to share state the actor model is a very clunky way of doing things.

Before I go on, let me emphasize that I like Erlang. I like actors, too. It's a very nifty model. But it's not a stateless model. Let me show what I'm ranting against:

The problem is that Erlang style actors can have shared, mutable (changeable), state. The model is all about shared state. If you didn't need to share mutable state then there are better alternatives than actors. And, importantly, even when you are using actors well you must think about all of the problems of shared mutable state. All of them. People who believe the propaganda are in for rude shocks.

The Situation

Last time I described a simple sock tube dispensing machine. Insert two coins, press the button, get a tube of socks. Insert too many coins and you get the extra coins returned. Push the button before you've inserted enough coins and you get nothing. Here's the diagram.

Imagine that Alice and Bob work at Crap Corp. ("Making High Quality Crap Since 1913"). Once a day they each like to saunter down to the break room and purchase a nice warm tube of socks. But, this is Crap Corp. and the machines don't take regular coins but Crap Corp. Coins instead. Each CCC weighs 40 pounds (very roughly 18.1436948 kilograms).

Naturally, Alice and Bob don't want to carry 80 pounds of crappy tokens around with them so they each laboriously drag a token down to a machine, insert it, walk back to their cubicle, grab another and repeat. Now, if Alice and Bob take their sock breaks at very different times that's probably going to work fine. But if they tend to overlap bad things happen. It's possible for Alice to insert her first coin, Bob to insert his first coin, Alice to insert her second coin and get an coin back (BONUS! she cries happily, experiencing the greatest joy she's ever experienced at Crap Corp.) So Alice pushes the button, gets her tube of socks, and merrily skips back to her cube. Well, maybe not skip exactly, but whatever you do when you're ecstatically happy while carrying 40 pounds of crap.

Then Bob shows up, inserts his second coin, eagerly smashes the button to get his well deserved tube of socks and ... gets nothing. Feeling cheated he pounds on the machine, kicks it, shakes it, and rocks it back and forth. Inevitably, the machine tips over, falls on Bob, and crushes him with all the tons of Crap Corp. Coins that have been inserted over the weeks. A tragic ending for somebody who just wanted some socks.

Now, that outcome isn't guaranteed even if Bob and Alice start about the same time. On the way to inserting her first coin Alice could be waylaid by the boss looking for his TPS report. As Alice patiently explains that a) TPS reports were never her job and b) they were discontinued three years ago and c) her eyes are on her face not her chest, Bob could have merrily taken the two coin trips and safely received a tube of socks without ever knowing the mortal injury he narrowly avoided.

Finally, Some Damn Code

Any time something unwanted can happen as the result of unpredictable delays, scheduler priorities, workload, etc you have a race condition. What could be more unwanted than being crushed by a vending machine? And what could be more unpredictable than a pointy haired boss? We can write this up exactly in Erlang.

In a file called sockmachine.erl. First, a little standard module definition and export business.

Here are the guts of the machine. zerocoins(), onecoin(), and twocoins() are the states of the machine. When one is called it blocks, waiting for an message in its inbox. Based on the message it gets it responds with {nothing} if nothing happens, {coin} if it needs to return a coin, or {tubeofsocks} for the win. It also then calls the appropriate function for the next state - which might be the same state. These are all private functions not exported by the module. Note, there are more clever ways to write this - but for explanatory purposes I like this.

insertcoin and pushbutton are rpc style convenience functions that insert a coin or push the button. Or did I get that backwards? Well, whichever, they each return whatever they recieve as a message back from the machine.

Testloop repeatedly walks through the cycle of inserting 2 coins and pushing the button. It calls helper functions that mirror the state of the sock machine to show what it expects to happen at each step, complaining when things don't go well.

It's a litany of socks, bonus coins and crushed intestines. On my machine it's an oddly predictable litany, but in a real, distributed Erlang app it would be much more interesting and random litany as network delays would emulate pointy haired bosses even better than Erlang's scheduler.

Some Last Notes

With Erlang style programming, actors are the central unit of statefulness. Multiple actors can share access to one stateful actor. Hence shared state, race conditions, and ruptured spleens. Am I saying that Erlang or actors are bad? No, in fact I quite like them. What the Erlang model does very nicely is separate that which must be stateful because it is concurrent from that which is more pure computation. By making state so much more painful to write than "foo.x = foo.x + 1" the actor model encourages you to think about the consequences of sharing it. It also cleanly mirrors the mechanics of distributed computing and asynchronous IO. It's nice, but it's not stateless.

One last note. I started with "actors are all about shared state." Naturally one might ask "well, what about stateless actors - actors that don't change state or depend on state via IO?" Certainly those are viable uses of actors. But that's no longer concurrency, that's parallelism and IMHO futures, data flow variables, and Haskell's data parallelism are all cleaner ways to deal with parallelism. Someday soon I hope to write about them. In the meantime, the whole point of having the complexity of message passing instead of those simpler mechanisms is precisely to deal with the complexity of concurrent state.

One really last note. Sadly, simple straight up actors don't automatically compose very well. You can design a set of actors that interact correctly for one use case but that don't interact at all well when plugged into a different system. This is another aspect that actors share with traditional manual locks and shared mutable memory. To date the best known way to deal with composable state is transactions (optimistic, pessimistic, distributed, compensating, software, hardware, database, whatever). There are very nice transactional capabilities available for Erlang, but this is yet another area where the "no shared state" mantra can lead people to think that actors are the entire answer without needing anything else.

Try not to get crushed and good luck with your socks!

Postscript

It has been suggested in the comments that when people say that Erlang style actors don't share state they mean it doesn't share memory. First, I clearly defined state in the previous article as being different from its representation. But, just as importantly, I think that saying "we don't share memory" is a distinction without much relevance. It's mostly an implementor's point of view that doesn't reflect how a user must think about actors.

Here's some Erlang code for simple shared mutable variables. This isn't recommended Erlang usage, but it doesn't break the model in any way.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Oddly, given that state is such a central notion to so much programming, it's awfully misunderstood. How do I know? Because OO programmers think they can make it private and Erlang programmers think they don't share it. If you agree with either of those statements then this article is for you.

I want to start with a simple, hypothetical vending machines. It dispenses socks in a tube, which is cool, because "tube of socks" is a huge Internet meme. Well, not yet, but will be when this article makes the front of Reddit, Digg, Hacker News, and CosmoGirl.

So, anyway, the machine has a coin slot, a button, and a dispensing tray. If you put in two coins one after the other and press the button you get a tube of socks. If you insert two coins and then insert a third you get your coin back. Same with fourth, fifth, etc. Pressing the button after putting only one coin or no coins at all results in nothing happening. It's a simple machine, but it's enough to illustrate all my points. A diagram sums it up nicely.

This is, you guessed it, a diagram of a state machine. In particular this one is a finite state machine, but that's not important to this article. So I'm wasting time by mentioning it. And more time by explaining that I'm wasting time. The diagram shows 3 states labeled 0 coins, 1 coin, and 2 coins. Between the states are arrows labeled with an action you would take to cause the machine to move from one state to another. Some of the transitions also have an action that the machine takes during that transition like dispensing foot warmers or returning a coin. The diagram assumes an infinite supply of socks. And tubes. Got it? Good. Patent pending. Onward.

Hypothetical

Imagine I locked you in the room with a bag of coins and that machine. The machine is a sealed, glossy black, and glows with a malevolent sock tube evil. Imagine there's no way for you to see what's inside, no way to know how the machine actually works. Assignment: figure out as much about its internals as you can.

Even with these restrictions, I'd bet that with only a small amount of experimenting you could easily draw something like the diagram above. I mean, if I unlocked the room long enough for you to get a pen and paper you could draw it.

True, you'd never be certain you knew all the details. It could be that after dispensing 1,000,000,000,000 pairs of socks it would reward you with a unicorn instead. You also wouldn't know if the machine was written in Ruby or Java. Er, integrated chips or discrete components. So many details could still be hidden. But you would certainly know that the machine had state and that the state changed based on actions you took.

You Can't Make State Private

So, point #1) you can't make state private. You can hide the details of how the state is represented and you can carefully control the valid state transitions and you can control who has access to change the state, but you can't make the state private. State is the fact that something reacts differently to the same inputs at different times. Sometimes putting a coin in and pushing the button does nothing but sometimes it results in a cool tube of socks. That's state. The gears and transistors are hidden, but the state is observable. If your favorite OO object has all private data but one single method does something different based on changing values in that hidden, private, super secret data then by definition state has been exposed to anything with access to that method or anything that has access to anything that has access to that method or anything that has access to anything that...etc.

Now, hypothetically the tube sock machine could have some internal counter that counts the total number of coins that has ever been inserted. But if that counter is strictly internal and can never be observed then it's not private state, it's just dead code ... er useless machinery. Make sense? Good. Patent pending. Onward.

How You Can Make State Private

Having just explained that you can't make state private, I will now explain how you can make state private. Imagine if our sock machine were sealed inside another machine which has a single button and a single dispenser tray. Further, imagine the outer machine has an infinite supply of coins in its guts. Pushing the button on the outer machine causes it to insert two coins into the inner machine, push the inner button, and then dispense the resulting tube of socks. If you were locked into the room with this machine you would never know that inside lives a Rube Goldberg state machine. You would just know that pushing the button gives you socks, every time, no ifs, ands, or buts. To an outside observer this machine is stateless. Only by ripping opens its guts would you know the awful truth.

The moral is that you can't make state private with a "private" keyword, but you can make it local. In programming world that means you can implement something stateless using "local" mutable variables. State is relative to an observer. If you can't observe it changing, then it's not state as far as you're concerned. That's why it's perfectly valid to say that the pure parts of Haskell programs are done without state even though thunks are memoized. If that was gibberish to you, I apologize, it was gibberish to me too.

The End, Or Is It?

This long ass article was really just a prequel to the real article coming soon which will explain why Erlang style actor "shared nothing" message passing concurrency is all about shared state. Shocked? Good. Patent pending.